In 1970, getting to Afghanistan over land, through Turkey and Iran, was filled with the unrelenting drudgery of driving for weeks in a rickety bus with a bunch of travel-worn American and European hippies. The ride across many barren mountain ranges was as dull as I imagined it would be to drive circles around the never-changing landscape of the Moon.
I only wanted to travel to Afghanistan because one night, in a cafe in southern France, my husband unfurled from his back pocket a map of the world. He asked me to pick another country. I saw land-locked Afghanistan, lonely and remote and I decided in my 23rd year that I might, someday, have a story to tell about a place few people in my circle would have ever visited.
Kabul in 1970 looked to me then, like a city that everyone had just arrived in the day before yesterday. Many of the roads were unpaved and the people were in constant migration from one place to another. The only building I remember was a big warehouse with the word UNICEF written on the front in huge letters. On Halloween nights, when I was a child, I collected a few pennies at the bottom of a UNICEF can that was given to me in school. The next day I brought the loose change to school to be disseminated to children in a place I never expected to go.
In countries where foreigners were rare and weren’t always trusted, most social interactions for newly arrived tourists were with the street children who waited in train stations and airports for an opportunity to earn some income. That is how I met Ahmed, a nine-year-old Afghani boy who offered to shine my shoes for a small baksheesh. A worn wooden box held together by rope, his shoe-shine kit, was slung over his shoulder. Ahmed ran towards us as if we were members of his family returning home after a long absence. He spoke to us in rapid-fire Farsi. When he realized we could not understand, he pointed repeatedly at our cloth sneakers. Our shoes could not be shined. Neither could the green plastic slippers he wore.
Disappointed, he slumped and began to walk away. I caught up to him, inventing gestures until he understood, laughed and took my hand.
We bought him a pair of leather shoes in the open market and every day we spent in Kabul we paid him to shine his own shoes.
Of course a fun memory playing a game with two tourists for several weeks with some coins in his pocket would have no impact on the devastation to him and to his country the next 31 years would bring.
Now, I think about Ahmed every day. Today Ahmed would be 61 years old, surpassing the life expectancy for Afghani men by one year.
I imagine what his life might have been after 1979 when the war with Russia began. Ahmed would have experienced constant explosive devices, assassinations, bombings and night raids into houses of suspected insurgents. Could he have stepped on one of the eight-million landmines left in Afghanistan during the wars? Did he, like tens of thousands of other children, die or lose a limb by mistaking the small bright yellow bombs for food rations airdropped by humanitarian efforts? Did he become a Mujahadeen Freedom Fighter? Did he fight the Communists and eventually became a Taliban? Did he spend his life in Kabul? Or did war, famine and drought, bring him north to Mazur-I-Sharif or south to Kandahar? Did he help the Americans with “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the optimistic name President Bush called the campaign now lost.
Or did he survive, know the unveiled face of a wife, become a father, grandfather and somehow continue with his family to the Kabul Airport to fly to safety? I wish I knew his surname. I have no chance of meeting him again.
But I can hope.
I hope he is greeted by welcoming Americans who care about refugees. I hope he finds a place to live near the flourishing successful Afghan-American communities in California, Virginia and New York. I hope his children and grandchildren thrive. I hope people will be kind and generous. I hope he, his, mine and yours, never see another war again. Unlikely. But, I hope.
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